Words & Pictures to Follow: Brentwood Town vs Sporting Bengal United
Non-league football is being characterised by tight championship races this season, and this is as true in the Isthmian League Division One North as anywhere else.
It’s starting to feel like things being extremely tight at the top has become a bit of a motif in non-league football this season. One point separates the top five in the National League South, with Dorking Wanderers leading the lot, but having played a game or two more.
This isn't happening not every division—and perhaps it feels more pronounced to me because it seems to be happening more in the south—but it certainly seems to be a trend. In the Northern Premier League, only one division is anything much like tight, with two of their four league titles essentially already won.
But in the Southern League Premier Division Central, there are four points between the top five, with AFC Telford United at the top. There’s only a point between the top two in their Division One Central, as well. The closer to London you get, the more pronounced it seems to get. In the Isthmian League Premier Division, there’s one point between the top five*. This time the joint-leaders are Dartford and Billericay Town—both of whom we’ve already visited this season—with another three clubs a point beneath them.
It’s the same at the top of the Isthmian League Division One North table on this first weekend in February. Tied at the top on 62 points are Felixstowe & Waltham United and Bury Town, with Felixstowe enjoying a 14 goal advantage over their rivals on goal difference, and in third place are Brentwood Town, a point behind them on 61. And that’s where we’re off to this weekend, as they take on Sporting Bengal United on Saturday afternoon.
It is the strangest thing, to know the way to only one place in a particular town or city, but to know it extremely well. It is very strange indeed to have a place for which you have two of them. I worked for the Ford Motor Company for six years. After the punishing hours but enormous fun of betting shops, I needed a 9-5 and I needed my weekends back, like, properly. Their credit division had an office in St Albans. It was a job I took with a shrug and left with a shrug, about six years later.
At the time, Ford Motor Company’s UK head office was in the Brentwood suburb of Warley. I didn’t have a car and didn’t want to drive one, so I became intimately acquainted with the route from Brentwood railway station to this big L-shaped building about a mile away. You always got the feeling that they looked upon us hicks schlepping all the way over from the St Albans office as the Verulam Hillbillies. More than once, I felt as though I was being looked at very much as they might have a long-lost tribe emerging from a bush at the end of their gardens.
I know another one now, and I’m there this weekend. It’s a bit of a walk. And when I say a bit of a walk, I mean quite a lot of a walk. And when I say quite a lot of a walk, I mean about three and a half bleedin’ miles. Brentwood’s ground is situated adjacent to the A12, which is at least appropriate for a town which was in some ways best known for its association with a car manufacturer. I'm walking from Hutton, on the other side of town. The temptation to walk as far as Shenfield station and just grab a taxi might prove overwhelming.
There was a Brentwood Football Club that reached the quarter-finals of the FA Cup in 1886, but it wasn’t this one. That one faded from view. This one originally started as Brentford & Warley and won the outstandingly-named Delphian League three times during the 1950s before turning professional and changing their name to Brentwood Town in 1965. Initially there was success. After two years in the Metropolitan League they joined the Southern League Division One in 1967, winning the title and promotion into the Premier Division in 1969. That year they also reached the Second Round of the FA Cup before losing 10-1 to Southend United.
The following year they did go one better. In the First Round of the FA Cup they beat Reading 1-0 at their home, The Hive. In the next round they went to Claremont Road, the home of the legendary amateur club Hendon, and won 2-0. It was only in the Third Round that they met their matches, beaten 1-0 at home by the Northampton Town team that would be on the receiving end of George Best a couple of rounds later. In the League, they finished a perfectly respectable League season in ninth place.
But the end was coming, and when it arrived it was both swift and harsh. At the end of the 1969/70 season, the directors of the club confirmed that they would be merging with Chelmsford City. But in the end, with registrations required for the new season and the FA dragging their feet over ratifying the merger, the Brentwood Town directors instead wound up the club and transferred their interest to Chelmsford.
A new board of directors was elected at the Chelmsford City Summer 1970 AGM, consisting of five former Brentwood directors and the former Chelmsford chairman. Chelmsford had been hotly pursuing election into the Football League and had won the Southern League Premier Division in 1968, but they were running out of money. They had the ground, the catchment area and the support. Brentwood couldn’t match the potential. Brentwood Town were closed down, and The Hive was sold for housing.
Following the dissolution of the club another local club called Manor Athletic changed their name to Brentwood Athletic, later to just Brentwood, and eventually Brentwood Town in 2004, three years after winning the Essex Senior League for the first time. They repeated that trick in 2007 and this time it led to promotion into this very division. They’ve been here for eighteen years now, bar one. They won promotion through the play-offs in 2015 but were relegated straight back from whence they came the following season.
Over the three seasons since the two-year pandemic interregnum, they’ve been doing pretty well. They’ve finished third, eighth and fifth over the last three years, losing on penalty kicks to Canvey Island in the final of the 2022 Division One North play-offs and doing the same against Bowers & Pitsea at the end of last season. It is impressive to get through two sets of play-offs unbeaten, but without getting promoted either.
There is, of course, every chance that they could end up in the play-offs again this season, while a home re-match against Southend United, this time in the FA Trophy, drew a club record attendance of 1,323 and ended in a creditable performance and a 5-3 defeat. In the League, they lost at home to Brightlingsea Regent last weekend but bounced back from that with a win at Tilbury on Tuesday night. The Brightlingsea loss was their first in thirteen games.
Their opponents this weekend are not having quite as much fun this season, but they’ve travelled quite a long way very quickly since the pandemic. Sporting Bengal United were promoted through the Essex Senior League playoffs at the end of last season, but this season has been a challenge. Attendances haven’t risen above two figures often at their athletics stadium home in Mile End. They’re one place off the bottom of the table, albeit still only three points from safety.
It is reasonable to say that their progress over the years has been… unusual. Formed in 1996 to promote football in London’s Asian community, they played intermediate football until 2003, when they joined the Kent Senior League. In their eight seasons in their league they finished bottom on four occasions. In the 2008/09 season they lost all 32 league games and conceded 160 goals; exactly five a game.
Yet they kept going. They transferred into the Essex Senior League in 2011—they were the only Kent Senior League team playing north of the Thames, so it made sense—and things did slowly improve. In 2018/19 they finished 8th out of 20. It was the first time, at the sixteenth attempt, that they’d managed a single-digit final league position since transferring into the senior game. The following year, the pandemic locked everything down for two seasons.
What’s truly surprising is what has happened to them since football resumed again in 2021. Their first season back was not a success. They finished the season bottom of the Essex Senior League on 13 points, having won just three of forty games while conceding 140 goals. But then they transferred to the Eastern Counties League and got promoted back at the first attempt via a penalty shootout win in the playoffs, and once back in the Essex Senior League managed to get up through the playoffs again, this time beating Romford. Small wonder this season is proving something of a stretch.
Their home is at the Mile End Stadium in East London, which is probably best known for having hosted a Blur concert at the height of Britpop’s suffocating mania in August 1995. It leads a somewhat more sedate life these days, still in use as a community facility as well as for Isthmian League football. Yes, as it happens, it is already on my list for the rest of this season.
On paper, of course this should be a home banker. It’s 3rd versus 21st. The top scorers in the division against the second-lowest. But this is only part of the story. There are sub-plots here, about a club that was literally sold down the river and which is now involved in a three-way tussle for promotion, and a club which has a broader purpose than most. But the biggest story here for me this weekend might turn out to be that three and a half mile walk. TAXI!
Words and pictures to follow, on Sunday.
*Note: All of these positions may have changed by 5.00pm on Saturday afternoon, should you be the sort of maniac who’d read this after the event; I say this in the full knowledge that I am precisely that sort of maniac.